As part of our trip to Shanghai, we went to China Joy for a day. This is somewhat like the Chinese answer to E3, and earplugs are absolutely recommended.

To be exact, we only spent half a day there. I couldn’t imagine why I’d want to stay any longer than that. It is very much a show made for a prepubescent male audience, and the focus is clearly on catgirls and hotpants, not on games. Now, I’m not averse to either catgirls or hotpants, don’t misunderstand, but there’s something about an entire show clearly only going after base instincts that creeps me out. Call me weird, but I would have liked to see more games.

Not everyone’s a catgirl, though:

The games fall in two categories: Western games that have successfully partnered with chinese distributors like The9 to capture the market here, and Chinese or Korean titles. The latter are easily recognized by being either very strange in concept or very simple in technology and gameplay. Or both. Also, they crash a lot, especially the Chinese ones. I’ve never seen so many windows desktops at a show as I have here. The technology of Chinese games is far behind, we’re talking 2D sprite graphics that you’d expect to see on a gameboy and 2-frame animations that would make every artist back in Oslo go into a fetal position and cry.

Finally, my favourite use of a Segway so far:

Remember, Kids: Marketing is a difficult business. It takes years and years of university and a degree to come up with this stuff.